Double Arco Iris, #3. Shoshone Tribal Lands, Wyoming, 2014
No, not the gangland kind of drive-by–instead, I refer to the following scenario…
You are driving along some highway or in town somewhere or even on a freeway. It is early morning, or getting on toward sunset. Perhaps you are on vacation, but maybe you are just going to work or to the grocery store. You have your camera in the car with you, the battery is charged and the memory card is formatted and ready.
Then, the twilight light suddenly turns eerie and spectacular–there is an awesome image to be made, you think–somewhere. Somewhere! But where?
If you just stop, aim, and shoot, you may capture some truly unique and special circumstance, but you’ll be aiming through heavy power lines, or across a vacant lot, or across three lanes of traffic.
Time is of the essence. The light is changing…fading…rapidly. You feel the need to hurry.
What to do, what to do…What is the solution?
Some steps:
1) Find a safe place to pull off of the road. No need to get smushed on the highway like a chunk of a skunk for the sake of a photograph.
2) Try to find some sort of interesting foreground element, human-made, or otherwise. Ideally, there could be a nice mid-range element or elements to be found as well. Then, frame the background (this may very well be what caught your eye in the first place). As an example of exactly this urban-type, power line-infected, quickly-changing, photographic situation, see my November 12, 2013 blog post.
3) Ideally, you can find a foreground element that leads into the image–maybe a log, a row of bushes, the road itself, power line poles, even a blurred stream of automobile traffic (embrace the distractions!), whatever. But, use these lines consciously to take the viewer by the hand and walk them into your scene.
4) Take a second to check your camera settings–especially things like ISO and appropriate f-stop. (I hate inadvertently shooting something at ISO 3200 when ISO 100 would have been the right choice…or f/22 when f/5.6 would work fine. I do this more often that I’d want to admit.)
5) Capture the scene with a multitude of perspectives and exposures. You never really know which might be the best until you are sitting down and calmly sorting through the images.
6) Capture a series of images from the beginning to the end of the laser light show. Sometimes, just when you think the spectacle can’t get any better–it does! Don’t make the mistake of driving off, thinking you have it on your memory card only to watch helplessly from the irritatingly intimate innards of a traffic jam as the sky explodes up to yet another layer of intensity.
In the case of the above photograph, we were driving along a sort of non-descript, Great Plains-like, landscape north of Lander, Wyoming, when this rainbow began to develop. The golden light on the grasslands and storm clouds was also quite special. The instant I saw even a small, budding, stump of a leg of the rainbow, I started looking down the highway for “the spot”, positively anticipating some quality rainbow growth as the sun dropped lower in the west.
So, instead of pulling off immediately, I waited just a tad and within a minute or two I managed to find a small pullout area across from a small farm. By then, a single full rainbow had formed. The bushes and road leading to the farm provided some leading line potential and the farm itself served as sort of a mid-range item of interest.
Of course, the surprise primary subject became the double rainbow that eventually shouted hallelujah from the watery heavens. The only hitch was trying to keep the lens free of fat, intermittent-but-persistent, glass-seeking raindrops while I watched the wonderful light mutate. Then, within maybe 15 minutes and with the sunset, the entire scene evaporated into a bland gray.
POSTSCRIPT: I was informed that there is sort of a joke video on YouTube about double rainbows. Sure enough, here it is (and I’ll have you know that I completely identify with the guy):
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